“This third full-length recording by Mt. Zion finds the band continuing to work as a six-piece, with various guests on drums & a couple dozen folks on choral duty. The core personnel remains Efrim (guitar, piano, tapes, effects, vocals), Thierry (bass), Sophie (violin), Beckie (cello), Ian (guitar) & Jessica (violin).
While the band's previous album, Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward (cst018), was recorded immediately after a European tour and went to tape largely unadorned, the new record was sketched in rehearsals through the fall of 2002 & then extensively arranged in studio at the hotel2tango. The result is four long pieces, each in two or more sections, all featuring group &/or lead vocals. Efrim's increased vocal presence is the most obvious evolution from past efforts, yielding the most direct articulation of themes & emotions that have run throughout his work with Mt. Zion & godspeed you! black emperor. Long instrumental passages remain however, marked by the most compositionally deliberate, complex & precise writing the band has set to tape thus far. Dense layers of strings collide, blend & differentiate against a backdrop of ragged repeating guitar figures & noise treatments.
The amateur choir assembled for the 'fasola' sing-along on the opening track sets the tone for an exuberant community-rallying protest music that constitutes the spiritual foundation of the record. Destruction of communities (foreign & local) are lamented & eulogised in the following tracks, culminating in the album closer: an ode to the unzoned terrain surrounding the railyards adjacent to the neighbourhood where the band, along with many other Montreal musicians & artists, have lived since the early 1990s. This land is now being swallowed up by big box & condo development.
"This is Our Punk-Rock,”... addresses head-on the local/universal demise of uncontrolled and unregulated urban landscapes - a demise that stretches from the docile walls of superstore complexes & protest 'pens' in the West to outright military surveillance, harassment & murderous 'surgical' strikes by Western-backed armies in South America & the Middle East. This unbroken curve is at the heart of Mt. Zion's poetics & politics - this is their punk rock.” [press release]